Have dog, will wander - The Jewish Standard

Adventures can happen, even close to home, if you’re open for them. (And yes, if you define them generously.)

Every morning, I take one of my dogs on a long walk through my neighborhood on the Upper West Side. It’s beautiful — the builders of the century-or-so-old buildings that line it paid masons to put intricate stonework on them, although you can see it only if you remember to look up.

But on a soon-to-be-too-hot Sunday morning, with the day stretching taskless ahead, sometimes the urge to keep walking is overcomes me. So I walked up Riverside Drive, over the pedestrian bridge that takes you over to the west side of the Henry Hudson, right next to the river, close to the boats and the stones and the ducks and the tide, and instead of turning back south I kept going north.

The George Washington Bridge, somehow at once massive and elegant, seemed tantalizing close, just a mile or so away, so I kept walking toward it. There are parks and paths down there by the river; it’s beautifully maintained and full of bicyclists and walkers, dogs and babies, like a children’s book.

And then I saw it, at the base of the bridge, tiny and bright red. It was the Little Red Lighthouse, standing in the shadow of the Great Gray Bridge.

My mother had read “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge” to me, and I read it to my children, but I’d never seen it before (although I realized that I had seen it, but from a distance so far that the color didn’t show. It looked like a thumb, perhaps amputated from a giant, just plunked there. Not worth looking at).

When you get up close to the underside of the bridge, you see that it’s ugly; the paint is peeling, and it’s surrounded by fences and stay-away-or-else signs.

But the lighthouse! It’s beautiful. It’s simple. It’s plucky. It’s bright red, and it shines.

The book, like many children’s books, has a moral. Its message is that just as the Great Gray Bridge shines its light upward, to the sky, to keep planes from crashing into it, the Little Red Lighthouse’s light goes outward, warning ships away from the shore. Both are necessary. Neither is better than the other.

And then there’s the lighthouse’s new mantra, which it learns throughout the course of the book. “Though it knows now that it is little, it is still VERY, VERY PROUD.”

As we face the new world that confronts us, every week but particularly this week, when we mark the yearly low point of Tisha B’Av, we can remember that lesson. We’re small, but we are strong.

—JP

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